In the first post of this series, we shared more about the Workshop that started this all: an LD42023 hour, in which Giovanna and I learned what Librarians think about Wikidata. In our last post, we shared more about what brought these librarians to enjoy and contribute to Wikidata’s linked open-data ecosystem. But many times, inspiration comes from the projects we’ve learned about. So, in this post, we talk precisely about that. Which Wikidata+Library projects were known to this community? Let us dive deep into eleven of them:
1. The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), the Wikimedia Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation created a collaboration to enhance the accessibility and utilization of cultural heritage artifacts. One of the components of this collaboration has been to improve data quality by implementing Structured Data on Commons.
DPLA’s impact is tangible, with artifacts appearing in over
2,500 Wikipedia articles across 78 language versions, accumulating
over 100 million views. Webinars, informational coffee chats, and
live sessions offer valuable resources for those interested in
delving deeper into DPLA’s Wikimedia initiatives. This work has
made DPLA one of the largest institutions to upload to Wikimedia
Commons and
the biggest one to contribute to Structured Data on Commons.
DPLA welcomes new partners and institutions as the project
progresses to join this transformative endeavor. Read more here. If you want
to get more involved with DPLA, there’s also a Wikimedia Working
Group. Read more about it here.
2. Promoting Open Knowledge Practices
in African Libraries through Wikidata. This was a
WMF-approved grant proposal from the African Library and
Information Associations and Institutions, which trained
392 librarians trained in English and French (you
can
check out the materials as zip files in their
final report!)
3. ELTEdata is a semantic database developed at the Department of Digital Humanities of the ELTE BTK TI. The primary purpose is to organize and publish research groups’ materials in prosopography, bibliography, and other historical subjects in a semantic data network.
4. Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) used Wikidata to retrieve 4,300 Ukrainian URLs, which helped them in their mission to digitize and preserve Ukrainian digital cultural heritage.
5. The
Wikidata:WikiProject Nuremberg Trials is a collaborative effort
to create items for authors of documents
(primarily written statements or affidavits) used in
the Nuremberg Trials. Worth noting is the Cradle
template they made to help users contribute to their project by
filling up the fields.
6. The Wikidata:WikiProject Chinese Culture and Heritage is an initiative by 13 Chinese American librarians from several institutions who got together in 2020 to work on Chinese-related topics. During the last few years, this group has worked on challenges in creating Chinese-related Wikidata entries, a data model for Chinese women poets (a comprehensive list is available here), and different visualizations using the Wikidata SPARQL Query Service.
7. The Black Bibliography Project (BBP) is a Wikibase project that aims to build a Black Bibliography by reviving “the practice of descriptive bibliography for African American literary studies.” Its objectives are twofold: To fix the scarcity of Black print and bibliographies by enriching data and, more boldly, to rethink bibliographic and cataloging practices so that Black print culture is well described in its essence.
8. The
WikiProject University of Washington Libraries is an initiative
accomplished by catalogers from this same university. It is divided
into two other projects:
WikiProject PCC Wikidata Pilot/University of Washington and
WikiProject University of Washington Archival Metadata. UW
Libraries contributors are also involved in a third initiative, the
WikiProject Personal Pronouns.
– Members of the
Archival Metadata WikiProject for instance, have mapped
MARC fields to Wikidata fields and even have a Github
repository with them.
– The
WikiProject PCC Wikidata Pilot is a project organized by the
Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC), “an international
cooperative effort aimed at expanding access to library collections
by providing useful, timely, and cost-effective cataloging that
meets mutually accepted standards of libraries around the world.”
They are using Wikidata as an identity reconciliation service and
implementing identity management principles, as Wikidata lowers
“the barrier to authority creation and maintenance by PCC members.”
The University of Washington is one of the contributors to the PCC
Wikidata project.
One of the most interesting activities accomplished by the UW
Libraries on Wikidata is the tables filled with property
suggestions. These tables are essential information for those
looking for guidelines on how to best model Wikidata items and for
developing and establishing Wikidata best practices for library
data.
Discover their tables here:
Archival Collections,
Faculty and Staff,
Graduate Students,
General References and Qualifier Information,
UW Corporate Bodies,
UW Buildings,
Subjects,
Dissertations and Theses.
On this page, the project shares workflows, pieces of training,
and resources for those interested in learning more. And
on this page, you can find all the items created for the
Labor Archives of
Washington.
9. The Digital Scriptorium project
uses linked data and the Wikimedia environment to allow
better access to manuscripts. DS is a consortium of North
American institutions with collections of premodern manuscripts,
such as the Boston Public Library, University of Pennsylvania Indic
Manuscripts, and Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript
Library, among others.
DS uses Wikidata, Getty
Vocabularies, and FAST
to facilitate the access, search, and
research of manuscript data across its member institutions and
to “link to external authorities for richer context and deeper data
exploration.” The system also offers a Query Service, the DS
Wikibase SPARQL Endpoint. This service allows more comprehensive
data search and discovery.
Currently, DS is working to enrich its Linked Open Data and is
welcoming even more institutions to join the platform.
10. The Linked Data Research
Group was established in 2018 and is a Wikibase project that
uses and applies “linked data methods to investigate the
data-driven semantic indexing of text and time-based media
collections to facilitate the precision search for
attribute-bearing collection items, item parts, and other granular
components via SPARQL queries and URL-based locators.”
This work results in SPARQL queriable RDF knowledge graphs, which
the Office of Information Technology (OIT) from the University of
Alabama maintains on a local Wikibase.
For their explorations and investigations, they consider two
“overarching empirical questions”: the scalability of the
semantic indexing method and the state of
queriability of semantic indexing results.
Currently, they have three ongoing projects: 1)
Sports DAM Knowledge Graphs resulting from the semantic indexing of
time-based media collections; 2) Philology Graphs resulting
from the semantic indexing of text collections, and 3)
Documentary Series Knowledge Graphs resulting from the semantic
indexing of time-based documentary media collections
(series).
11. As the name indicates, the
WikiProject Wikidata Religion & Theology Community of Practice
is an initiative to improve and represent data about religion and
theology on Wikidata. It is mainly aimed at librarians and
encourages collaboration in this community of practice.
The project has developed data models, such as the “recommended
properties for person” and “recommended
properties for publications,” which include books, scholarly
articles, and publication venues. There’s also a list of
Religion-related journals needing metadata and authors needing
disambiguation.
On March 20, 2023, the initiative organized an event with ATLA, a “membership association of
librarians and information professionals committed to advancing the
study of religion and theology.” Following the event, the project
launched a demo video on manually adding an article to a
Journal in Religion in Africa:
This series will comprise six Diff posts, including this introduction, each describing at length the five Jamboard frames used in this workshop. Follow them here:
- #LD42023 I: The Future of Wikidata + Libraries (A Workshop)
- #LD42023 II: Getting to Know Each Other, Librarians in the Wikidata World
- #LD42023 III: The Examples, Libraries Using Wikidata (this post!)👈
- #LD42023 IV: Wikidata Tools everyone is talking about
- #LD42023 V: Main Challenges of Wikidata for Librarians
- #LD42023 VI: Imagining a Wikidata Future for Librarians, Together